No Big Bang--Just gentle whisper

Hopefully I'll have time to do this justice later, but for now... Where does GR fit into your picture? It is conspicuous by its abscence in your post yet is pivotal to any (sensibly scientific) discussion of the BB.

Hey, SG! Been a while... working on anything suitably on-topic for this thread? And yes, I agree totally. E/M is unbelievably well understood across the universe as evidenced by for example the prediction of the value of the gyromagnetic ratio, by the predicted and observed astrophysical processes observed at opposite ends of the universe, etc. Edited by cavediver, : No reason given.

Sorry Percy, but I have been waiting for so so long for this to be said/recognised by a non-professional of the field here at EvC. Thank you.There is of course the "slight" difficulty that understanding the problems meaningfully is often considerably more difficult than understanding the theory.And of course, NWR's problems come from not appreciating the whole theory (as he himself admits) Such appreciation, as you are bored of hearing me say, only comes from working directly in the field under question. My fields are(were) general relativity, quantum gravity and string/M theory. Consequently, I am NOT an expert at BB cosmology.

Just to pick up a possible new thread... imaginary numbers are not Real by definition, but what makes you so sure they are not real? The universe seems to rest upon the nature of complex numbers (via QM). Complex numbers are not apparent in our everyday world, but then neither are a 4 dimensional indefinite metric basis of space-time, Fermi-Dirac and Bose-Einstein statistics, etc.

I think you need to check out the COBE and (more importantly) WMAP satellites, their finding and the subsequent research. I think you will find that there is plenty of empirical investigation going on. 4 out of the 32 papers submitted to astro-ph today are BB related. That is ignoring all of the related theoretical papers of hep-th and gr-qc.With regard to your concerns over redshift representing recession, I think it has already been pointed out here that expansion or contraction is a prediction of General Relativity. The red-shift we observe is evidence for this prediction. We do not simply *assume* it is recession. Also remember that GR has been tested to an almost unimaginable degree of accuracy, not just here on Earth, but in the depths of the Galaxy. I would seriously challenge your contention that anything departing GR is more simple... GR, like SR, may appear complex to the unwary, but both are mind-boggling in their simplicity. Whatever you can construct to give GR both locally and Galactically, whilst providing for a static universe with some strange unknown red-shift phenomenon will be some strange bastard of a theory However, on the topic of your "extrapolations" there is the issue of whether we are justified in the use of the FRW solution of GR for the universe... do we have the correct matter distribution to create that type of space-time? Is the universe smooth enough? This would be an intersting discussion.What other evidence do we have? The CMBR you will have a very hard job explaining away as anything other than the surface of last scattering of the opaque early *small* universe. It is has numerous properties other than the simple black-body spectrum and isotropy. Check out the WMAP pages of Wiki for more details.Talking of small, the fairly early universe has a much larger angular size on the celestial sphere, as you are spreading it over the entire sky (like the antarctic cirlce viewed from the North Pole), so early objects appear much larger than more recent objects. I've not found any published observational evidence of this (haven't really looked to be honest) but sooner or later it will be a fact to contend with - or maybe not, in which case things will get much more exciting!Finally, for now, your suggested possibilities wrt red-shift sound like they are going to cause big problems for our assumptions of isotropy and homogeneity (Copernican and Cosmological Principles) which is just something to bear in mind.I must admit, despite the above, a little of your skepticism has rubbed off and I would like to see if we can confirm the recessional velocity of some of the more local distant objects.

Thanks for that. Hadn't seen it as I have been single-minded on my business for the past 18 months. But this is actually my favourite topic of all. When I was a bit more serious, I was getting into Topos Theory for similar reasons.Also, at the less extreme end, we used to play around with relaxing all sorts of conditions. Orientability was the favourite, which led into the work on pinors and even pistors - the non-orientable counterparts of spinors and twistors; but also varying signature with Kleinian space-times. The driver behind this work was the quantum foam.It all plays into my Grand Scheme, where "reality" is actually a natural and necessary consequence of logic.

Yes, but not "local distant" as I specified. It is a technical term that refers to the closest objects whose cosmological red-shift dominates that of their peculiar motion... or perhaps I just made it up No Time, as ever, closed the discussion for now. There is hope...And I don't believe it is unanswerable and it most definitely isn't irrelevant, even if it is only to silence (fat chance) certain critcis. We don't need direct measurements, just contributing evidence would be nice. So say in about twenty years then? (given past experience of such predicted time-scales!) It's secondary and tertiary effects that we need to think about. Of course they are. Exceptionally strong. However, what has piqued my interest is that our primary evidence - expansion of the universe as implied by recessional velocities as implied by cosmological red-shifts - perhaps could do with having some of its "implied"s beefing up a little. It's a discussion for cosmologists amongst cosmologists, that is all.This is where us scientists always fall down in debate with creationists/skeptics - all they have to do is make one statement that makes us think "hmmm, perhaps I haven't given that enough thought - I must look into that" and we are in science mode, all thought of debate gone. We are scientists after all, not evangelists for science. Edited by cavediver, : typos

Standard candles - great for distance (though not totally reliable as recent research has shown), but they don't give evidence of recession. nwr is not convinced that the distance related redshift is caused by recession. However, if you look at SGs post above, you will see that the BB prediction is a little more complicated than a simple distance relation, so nwr has his work cut out to come up with a competing theory.Just another point on standard candles... who would have predicted their availability in the beginnings of cosmology? To measure the distance of even near-by galaxies must have seemed like a task for distant future generations And your discussion of better and better parallax measurements (larger and larger base-lines) is precisely one way in which we will get a clearer picture of the universe by direct measurement. There are already plans to send a telescope to the edge of Solar System for precisely such a purpose. Hipparchus was the small scale version of this, using an orbiting telescope.I don't think anyone has said that all measurements of light are off-limits: it's just the interpretation of the red-shift that nwr is questioning. And we aren't stuck with studying one object such as M33; we are interested in the global effect, so we can take entire distributions of measurements and use them to our advantage.

Hey, some great thoughts there! And very close to reality. The gravitational field isn't the electromagnetic aether but it is remarkably similar.Each of the forces we know has its own "aether-like" field - gravitation, eletromagnetism , weak nuclear, and strong nuclear. The search for the unified field theory (that dominated Einstein's later life) has already met with great success. The EM and Weak fields have been shown to be aspects of one field: the electro-weak field. We have the unproven but highly-suggested Grand Unified Theory (GUT) which brings EM, weak and strong together as one Grand field.The problem has always been getting Gravitation and the other fields to work together. The problem is quantum mechanics. We have no complete quantum theory of gravitation yet, and there are no classical theories of Weak and Strong. However, we can look at the Maxwell's classical (original) theory of EM and combine that with Gravitation. This was done the best part of a century ago, though it was little noticed at the time.What you do is imagine space-time as being five dimensional, not four. There is an extra space dimension. And we look at the theory of General Relativity (gravitation) in this five dimensional universe. We then roll up the extra dimension, so that it appears as a little loop (by little I mean as far below the atomic scale as the atomic scale is from us). So the universe looks four dimensional (3 space plus time) but each point is not a point but actually a little loop, and you have to specify where on the loop you are looking, and this extra positional number is the fifth dimension. Ok, the universe looks just like ours with normal gravitation. BUT there is something extra! There is also electromagnetism. It wasn't there in the 5d theory before we rolled up that extra dimension, but the bit of gravitation that got rolled up now appears in our effective 4d theory as electromagnetism!!! So electromagnetism IS gravitation.Now this is far from proved, but this principle lies at the heart of some of our advanced theoretical ideas about the universe: String Theory, M Theory and SuperGravity. It is also key to why we LIKE extra dimensions in our theories, rather than viewing them as problems. Extra dimensions are one way of getting unification.